Dr. Jessica Shepherd
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Jessica Shepherd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So now that we have that foundation of why sleep is so important, the three hormones that are crucial for that are going to be your estrogen, your progesterone, and your cortisol. And your cortisol, which I'll start with, has to do with your circadian rhythm, the reasons why we sleep, why we should sleep certain times.
And cortisol has releases throughout the night, usually in the midnight and then early in the morning around 5 a.m. Okay. So if your cortisol, remember, these are chemical messengers that work on a timeframe.
Stress, life, and estrogen as well.
Right? So the estrogen decline now gives you hot flashes and night sweats. So now you're waking up at the middle of the night because you're having a night sweat. So then your circadian rhythm, which was impacted by cortisol, is also taking a hit. It's deregulated and you're not getting good sleep quality. And then progesterone, progesterone is the comfy hormone. It likes to relax us.
It likes us to kind of settle down and feel good. And so we're also having fluctuations in progesterone. So it can't do the job that it really would like to do, which is give you sleep quality and relaxation. So all of these different turns and like declines and it's impacting our sleep, which then impacts our health.
And that's why we're starting to see that sleep or sleep health rather is so imperative and we need to pay more attention to our sleep.
Yes. So this is where we look at repleting maybe our hormones. Hormone replacement therapy can be a vehicle or a tool to kind of get you back to where you need to be hormonally. But then also we can look at practices. A lot of times during that kind of deregulation or brain, a lot of women will say, my mind just races at night.
Ruminating. So decreasing rumination is where we need to do our work, our homework with quieting the brain down. So that is gonna be your meditation and your mindfulness, taking the screen away before you go to bed. I'm talking to myself as I say that. And then the other thing is actually when we look at CBD, and what it's able to do as well has been helpful.
It is very important, and I'll say this candidly, you have to know where you're sourcing it from. And so CBD, we have endocannabinoid receptors in our bodies, which also contribute to relaxation, is that you have to appreciate where it's being sourced and then seeing... is to have CBN, which is another part of the plant that actually helps with relaxation. So that's another way as well.
So mindfulness, that's our homework, making sure what are you eating? There are foods that are going to be inflammatory and going to kick off that cortisol. So decline in alcohol. Oh. Decline in processed foods and sugar. You're fired, Dr. Shepard.
Absolutely. I've seen it through and through. I think that even in my personal life, I was starting to see sleep disturbances. And I had to take a real hard stop and being like, what's really going on? And taking that time to, again, reflect on yourself. And I think that is self-care. Sometimes self-care, yeah, can be getting a manicure or a pedicure.
But how am I going to take care of myself requires peeling away the layers of saying, am I contributing to the best version of myself or not? And what are the ways that I can do that? And am I going to pay attention to myself?
What does the thyroid do? The thyroid is this cute little organ that is the metabolic kind of engine of our bodies. It really is... Kind of the, we're going to go at this pace, at this rate. We're going to make things go quick. We're going to make things go slow. Which is why when people have hypo, which is less levels of that thyroid hormone, things are moving slower, right?
Typically, they'll gain a little bit more weight. They're a little bit more sluggish, have fatigue syndromes. And then people who have too much of that thyroid... They're doing things too fast. It's like this metabolic train is like really pumping. It's like the speed train. And you're like, slow it down. So the goal is to keep it in that range where everything is moving right.
It's kind of like, is that the Goldilocks? A little bit too much, a little bit too little, just enough. So we want it in that just enough phase.
And so when we start to see you can have heat intolerance if it's too much and cold intolerance if it's too slow. So the goal really is to kind of keep it in that homeostasis. And so when that starts to shift, it is very interconnected with estrogen.
And so we start to see a little bit more thyroid issues as women go through perimenopause and menopause because the estrogen is not there to talk to the thyroid.
Oh, that is one of the, I would say that is one of the hormones we can definitely see on labs.
Absolutely. Gotcha, and then how do you treat it? So you can treat it either through medication, depending on if it's severely too high or too low. That's when a patient needs medication to kind of get it to homeostasis. Then you do have people who have symptoms, and it may not be all the way out of that kind of normal range, That's how you can impact with diet.
That's how you can impact with exercise as well. And so it's really important that you understand your body. If it's changing, if something is happening that doesn't feel right to you, to make sure that you see your doctor because the goal is not to wait until you're like completely just feeling horrible and then now we do have a problem.
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